The Kansas Chapter of The Ninety-Nines is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the founding of the international organization of women pilots.
The local chapter is hosting a reception from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 2 at Hangar One on the second floor.
The Ninety-Nines was founded in 1929 and named for the group’s first 99 charter members. Its first president was aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
WICHITA– The Federal Aviation Administration and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association are sponsoring a safety seminar tonight entitled , “What Went Wrong?” covering the causes of aircraft accidents.
The seminar will be held from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Yingling Aircraft’s Maintenance Hangar at 2010 Airport Road.
Mac McClellan, editor-in-chief of Flying Magazine, has been a pilot for about 37 years. McClellan was in Wichita and getting ready to fly home from Jabara Airport when he had a problem with his Wichita-built Beech Baron.
It seems he had a dead magneto on the left engine. The mechanics at Midwest Corporate Aviation at Jabara Airport went to work. “Wichita is probably the only city in the United States where a magneto coil is on the shelf and available, so I was in the air after only a couple hours delay,” McClellan wrote in the October issue.
I won’t go into the puzzling problem he had with the magneto. But if trouble had to happen, being here in the Air Capital, where the planes are built, sure had its benefits.
Keep an eye on the sky.
If you looked up this morning, you may have seen a skywriter promoting this weekend’s Flight Festival. I went out on the Wichita Eagle’s third floor deck this morning to see a skywriter starting the “W” as he wrote “Air Show” in large white letters. The show runs Saturday and Sunday at Jabara Airport.
You may want to keep an eye to the air today.
Six local volunteers from the Kansas Pilots Association took part in helping save a piece of U.S. history earlier this month.
They flew to the historic Wendover Air Field, a 1940s Army airfield, in Utah to help restore the airfield.
The airfield, located about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, was the training site for the 509th Group for its mission to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
The Air Force selected a B-29 Superfortress and one of its best aviators, Col. Paul Tibbets Jr. to form and train a group devoted to dropping the bomb. Tibbets selected Wendover Air Field as the training site. He thought the remote location was perfect for the secrecy surrounding the project. For a time, it housed the Enola Gay, the B-29 Tibbets used to drop the bomb, “Little Boy.”
During the trip to the airfield, KPA volunteers excavated piled-up dirt and debris from a second bomb loading pit on the base, said Johanne Pachankis, who organized the trip. They found only a few relevant items, wooden framing, wiring leads, rusted piping and a piece of uniform cloth, she said. They cleaned the pit down to its concrete flooring.
Al Madero, Art and Alice Hatch and David and John Krueger also made the trip.
This is the transcript of the recent emergency landing of a Super King Air 200 after the pilot died during the flight. One of the passengers was a private pilot, but he was a self-confessed “low time single engine” pilot without any turbine experience.
It’s amazing how calm he remained and how controlled he was under the circumstances, considering there was a “dead pilot sittin’ next to me.” His voice gets more tense as he gets closer to landing, but he remained in control.
He also was assisted by the calm professional air traffic controller.
http://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/2009-4-12/media/kingairsave.mp3
